Making Languages More Comprehensible

CI Online

The world feels like it’s burning right now. Everyone should pay close attention to police brutality, those defending it, and so-called “leaders“ encouraging it and inciting further violence from white nationalists. If we can’t stand against systematic racism directly, we must be observant of what’s going on in solidarity. No one gets to tune this out, and if you do, recognize that privilege. So, this eBook announcement of mine is insignificant in comparison. Nonetheless, teachers’ attention at some point will have to shift to next year’s micro world of school and the classroom. This is what I have to offer when it comes to putting out some of those fires.

I’ve teamed up with Storylabs to offer the Pisoverse in digital form. All novellas are now available as an annual subscription for ALL your students (up to 180…and if you have more than 180, may the Olympian gods hep you!). Options include single books, packs of 3, or complete Pisoverse All Access. The eBooks are all web-based, and a school-safe certificate is on its way for a downloadable app.

Storylabs also has some tools for teachers, like tracking how long students spend reading, built-in notebooks, and the ability to create, share, and use resources other teachers have made for each book! If you have ideas, there’s a link to a Google form in each book’s Index Verbōrum. Or, fill that out directly, now. Unlike some textbook companies, we want to encourage collaboration between teachers sharing materials that support reading novellas. Just be sure to check first to see if you’re creating something that already exists in a Teacher’s Guide! Oh, and all the narration and Audiobooks I’ve recorded is included with the eBooks on Storylabs! Each student can listen to every chapter as many times as they want while reading at their own pace. There’s also built-in adorable Italian pronunciation for the few books I haven’t recorded, too!

At least half a dozen times now, I’ve sent a message to other Latin teachers with something like “wow, I really gotta get back into storytelling, with shorter stories, and a lot of them.” Well, now’s the perfect time for that…

I just provided feedback to all my students who completed a school-wide Google Form assignment this week. My feedback was a simple greeting that also referenced what was written in their reflection section of the Google Form. It took me hours. Hours. No wonder teachers who give written/typed feedback say they have no time to create or adapt texts!?!

Now that we’ve gone remote courtesy of COVID-19, this kind of feedback is the only way to connect with students asynchronously (aside from a personalized video…which would take even longer than typing). Of course, in typical teaching contexts, this written/typed feedback usually includes corrections. Let’s take a closer look at this practice that’s sapping a lot of time…

OK fine, the grammar-translation (GT) method has been used for a few hundred years. It’s still the dominant practice for teaching Latin, and widely known. However, what is there to the method, really? I’ve been thinking about this for a long time, but it turns out the method is quite simple. GT actually consists of presenting students with textbook grammar rules they apply to words in order to understand the target language. As a method, then, teachers present rules, but what is GT—really—for the student?

Memorizing.

I posit that the entirety of GT can be reduced to memorizing. This makes it less a method, and more just a process. Students listen to or read about textbook grammar rules, and then recall and apply those rules in order to derive meaning. To be clear, this is a fairly complex way to arrive at step zero—establishing meaning. With GT, students not only must do this for themselves, such as consulting dictionaries and grammar notes, which accounts for a lot of “the work,” but the conscious process requires a decent amount of cognitive demand. Actual interpretive communication, on the other hand, either listening or reading, is an implicit, unconscious process, and effortless. In order to effortlessly apply textbook grammar rules while also recalling word meanings, though, a very good, if not uncanny memory, is required. Memory, then, is both paramount to student success with the GT method, as well as something we have no control over…

Before having the opportunity to present a couple workshops, my mind was blown quite sufficiently during the week. Overall, the Advanced Track with Alina Filipescu and Jason Fritze got me thinking about aaaaaaaall the things I’ve forgotten to do, or stopped doing (for no good reason) over the years. Thankfully, most of them are going to be soooooo easy to [re]implement. As for the others, I’ll pick 2 at a time to add—not replace—until they become automatic. This will probably take the entire year; there’s no rush!

Jason referred to high-leverage strategies—those yielding amazing results with minimal effort (i.e. juice vs. squeeze), and I’m grateful that he called our attention to everything Alina was doing while teaching us Romanian. ce excelent! I’ll indicate some high-leverage strategies, and will go as far as to classify them as “non-negotiable” for my own teaching, using the letters “NN.” I’ll also indicate strategies to update or re-implement with the word “Update!” and those I’d like to try for the first time with the word “New!” I encourage you to give them all a try. Here are the takeaways organized by presenter:

As I reflect a bit, my experience with Teaching CI Online was fine. The obvious physical barrier you would expect to be an issue didn’t actually impede much of anything. CI Online is absolutely possible. One major drawback was lack of reliable internet. On bad days, we just didn’t have class. Occasionally, I had to mute all microphones or disable cameras because of taxed bandwidth at a particular school. That was not cool for checking comprehension, teaching to the eyes, and making connections. If a school was prepared, there were no problems.

The 3 dots on the lower left link to a slide with a bunch of numbers, but my students already understood the interviewed student’s response of quīndecim as 15, so I began using the images and phrases to ask different questions to verify the detail. I almost got stuck when I asked “is he older than…” while pointing to the senex (old man). Instead, I kept my finger where it was, and asked the class “what is HIS name? What is HE called?” One student quickly said “Frank.” Now I was free to use “is he (our interviewed student) older than Frank?” Then I looked over at the Roman boy on the other side of the slide and asked “what is HIS name? What is HE called?” The class looked at the same student who answered before, who said “Phil,” which was great, so I said “Ohhhhhh, how old is Phil?” The same student thought a minute, and said “8.” So, we continued using the four phrases on the board (all using “habet”) and got quite a bit of mileage out of that one.